DIY-Whisky Part I

Yeah, yeah I know, sounds like one of those “add any random wood chips to your Whisky” posts. I sometimes wonder, how terrible does Whisky taste for someone to do such a thing! And do they seriously expect the flavour to get more favourable? Now, I can understand the concept of exploring the effect of wood on the destillate but then just compare a younger and an older Whisky from the same distillery. Bang, now you’ve got some useful information!

Anyway! I got a little off track here. After returning from Scotland, loaded with lots of usefull destillery insight, I asked myself: How hard can it be to make our own Whisky, since the process is really quite basic. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of variables in creating a good dram (yeast, water, cask, cuts etc.) But it was never the idea to distill and age a superb Whisky. It was simply the challenge of going through the process. After reading some books on distilling and finding suppliers for brewing eqquippment and such, I proposed the endevour to The Whisky Agents.
They where all-in!

We set a date and orderd all the things we needed. On an April weekend we where ready to go. The first step is to create a basic beer without hops. We used two 40L pots fueld by a woodfire to brew roughly 200L of wort (the correct term in regards to whisky). It took us litteraly all day to fill our fermantation barrels. After cooling the wort we added the yeast and waited for five days until we reached the desired alcohol content of ~7% vol. Next up: Distilling!